Spilling the beans

The launch of a tell-all book by a former insider at the world's most notorious whistle-blowing website was never going to be a quiet affair. Faced with a media onslaught, the publishers of a book by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the former Germany spokesman for WikiLeaks, were forced to move the press conference to a cavernous room in an 18th century building in Berlin's historic Mitte district.

The book, which is now on sale, is entitled "Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website."

A former computer programmer, Domscheit-Berg was an intimate of Julian Assange until he left WikiLeaks last September after a tense confrontation over how the organization was run. The 32-year-old has since set up an alternative website for leaks that he says is marked by a commitment to real transparency.

"WikiLeaks was a very intransparent organization even for someone like me who was one of the official spokespersons. That's exactly what we want to avoid with OpenLeaks. I believe an organization that is helping to shed light on wrongdoing needs to be transparent itself," Domscheit-Berg told Deutsche Welle in an interview following Thursday's press conference.

Taking on the powerful

The book offers insight into an elusive virtual outfit and its charismatic and polarizing founder and figurehead.

Domscheit-Berg, who joined WikiLeaks in late 2007, writes of his early days at the website - exchanging profanities with Assange on confidential chats - and is clearly in awe of the Australian-born hacker's virtual crusade in exposing corporate and government wrongdoing.

"It was simply great having him (Assange) around. Because I knew he was fighting for the same cause I was," Domscheit-Berg writes. "Because I knew his aim was to shake up society. To knock the bastards on the head, as he once put it."

Then came the first major leak in 2008, involving documents showing alleged illegal activities in an offshore operation of Swiss bank Julius Bär. It put WikiLeaks on the map.

"Julius Bär was a banking house with unlimited resources that had been represented by a powerful and aggressive law firm and they had been powerless against us and our cleverly constructed system," Domscheit-Berg, who went under the pseudonym Daniel Schmitt during his time at WikiLeaks, writes. "That made us proud."

Domscheit-Berg claims that he and Assange pretended to the media that WikiLeaks was actually much bigger than it was. That was apparently far from the truth.

"We were just two guys with a tiny, out-of-date server. For the first time, I realized that we could stand up to anyone in the world," he writes.

Success leads to rifts

But the book turns increasingly pessimistic as WikiLeaks' mercurial rise ratchets up the pressure on the group, leading to disagreements between Assange and Domscheit-Berg over the type and frequency of leaks, finances and a feud over transparency.

Domscheit-Berg describes a desperate last-minute scramble in 2010 to black out names from 91,000 secret Afghanistan war documents after Assange failed to inform him of the crucial detail in a deal he'd cut with three media publications.

"We had gotten too big, and our cause too serious, to take everything easy. He (Julian) was addicted to states of emergency. Everything had to be as extreme, disruptive and important as possible," he writes.

With tension building as the website was inundated with ever more explosive leaks and an alleged source was imprisoned in the US, the book argues Assange failed to provide leadership and direction at a critical juncture.

"For some time, he (Assange) had begun describing people as "assets," not unlike a businessman talking about "human resources" or a military man referring to his troops," Domscheit-Berg writes. "Julian did not mean the word in a nice way. It showed that he saw our people as mere canon fodder."

'A man on the run'

Harald Schumann, a journalist at Berlin-based newspaper Der Tagesspiegel who spent time with Assange and Domscheit-Berg at a media conference in Iceland early last year, confirmed that the mood between the two back then was "tense."

"It wasn't just a clash of personalities but also a huge difference over strategy and handling of documents that led to the breakdown," Schumann, who has written extensively on WikiLeaks, told Deutsche Welle. "Assange appeared to me as an emotionally distant person, who made up for his inner instability with a certain hubris. He was in a way paranoid - like a man always on the run."

In late 2010, Assange suspended Domscheit-Berg for "disloyalty." He and others subsequently quit working with WikiLeaks, taking with them a sizeable cache of material, according to Domscheit-Berg to ensure that it was kept safely.

'Lots of little Julians'

But what's likely to grab the most attention is Domscheit-Berg's description of some of Assange's attitudes toward women. The 39-year-old is fighting extradition to Sweden to face allegations of sexual wrongdoing.

Domscheit-Berg says he discussed the theory of evolution with Assange, who believed that his genes deserved to be reproduced, and on one occasion bragged about the number of children he had allegedly fathered.

"He seemed to enjoy the idea of lots and lots of little Julians, one on every continent. Whether he took care of any of these alleged children is another question."

A better WikiLeaks?

For his part, Domscheit-Berg took with him not just the lessons learned at WikiLeaks but also five former colleagues, including one of the main technicians, when he left. Together, they've set up a new platform, OpenLeaks, which is expected to begin work in summer. It aims to "make whistleblowing safer and more widespread," according to its website.

In a bid to avoid being a top-down group like WikiLeaks, the platform will not handle and publish the documents itself but will act as a neutral conduit to connect leakers with media, trade groups and human rights organizations.

German blogger and Internet activist Markus Beckedahl said the site, a refined and modified version of WikiLeaks, would be "trustworthy and credible."

"OpenLeaks is the only website at the moment that has the robust technical infrastructure needed to provide a safe harbor for protecting sources with secret documents to publicize," Beckedahl told Deutsche Welle. "That's ultimately the most important thing when it comes to leaks."

Author: Sonia Phalnikar
Editor: Rob Mudge